h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have not read many of the posts/entries about this subject yet so I hope I don't repeat anything that has already been said.
I can't see how anyone can still doubt that evolution happens. It is taken for granted by pretty much all scientists that evolution is real. You can observe a form of evolution that occours over the short term with bacteria. Study a bacterial culture and change the immediate environment and you can watch natural selection or 'survival of the fittest' take place. It is likely that you will be able to observe mutations that give rise to changes in the way the bacteria behaves.
I thought the only thing left to resolve in the evolution debate is the issue of convergent evolution vs puctuated evolution.
I also can't see how the idea of evolution conflicts directly with the existance of god. If you take the bible at face value then yes it does imply an arguement against evolution but I think that is a bad way to interpretate it. Most christians I know don't disgree with evolution. They think that god did create man but that doesn't mean that he did it right off. If god created the thing that humans evolved from and the environment that caused the evolution to occour then surely that is the same thing as god creating man.
The thing to remember is that the bible was not written by a god it was written by people thus you would expect inacurate parts to be present. Of course that doesn't make it any less important to people, it just means that you have to be careful about interpretations.
Any of the books of Richard Dawkins provides interesting reading material on this topic. I disagree with some of the things he writes but on the other hand he offers some excellent explanations about what he believes in.
To go a little of point it is worth mentioning something that Bill Hicks spoke of. He spoke of a holy man he met on a plane that claimed that the earth is only 8000 years old. He asked the man how he knew this and the man said he added up the ages of all the people before Jesus and added that to the current year to come up with the figure of 8000. Pretty scientific right? So Bill said to him "what about the fossil records and the dinosaurs?" to which the bloke replied "Oh yeah, God put them there to test us". To test us? Does that me we have some kind of prankster god roaming around playing tricks on us?

Hope that made some kind of sense if not I will reprase some of it and try and explain myself better. I just happen to be a little busy right now

A couple of other examples of observable evolution:

The reason we cannot cure AIDS or the common cold is that they evolve too fast.

In Great Britain, the indsustrail revolution brought with it a lot of pollution. There are two types of peppered moth, the speckled and the dark. The speckled looks like a lichen, and was very hard for birds to see. The dark, meanwhile, stood out like a sore thumb, and hence was very rare as the birds liked to eat it. However, when the pollution caused all the walls to become blackened, suddenly the black moths had great camoflage and the speckled had none. Hence the dark moths are now very common in cities, with the speckled mothe being more common in the country. Natural selection!